


Is Moriarty... Mummy Holmes?

by SweetLateJuliet



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-27
Updated: 2014-01-27
Packaged: 2018-01-10 05:19:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1155564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SweetLateJuliet/pseuds/SweetLateJuliet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Explores what we know about Moriarty based on all three series. Speculates on the Moriarty reappearance at the end of S3.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Is Moriarty... Mummy Holmes?

_Be warned; this one’s really long, spanning all three series. As always, all hail[Ariane Devere](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Ariane_DeVere) and her transcripts._

**I started out thinking I’d try to persuade you that Mummy Holmes is Moriarty.**

I’m still going to do that. But along the way I came up with an even wilder idea, and I’ll throw that in at the end.

To keep my references clear, I’ll use these names:

-Andrew Scott’s character is **Jim**.

-Wanda Ventham’s character is **Mummy**.

-The criminal mastermind who toys with Sherlock is **Moriarty**.

  


**There’s More to Mummy Than Meets the Eye**

Both times we see Mummy in S3, she’s subtly connected to power, secret knowledge, and danger.

The first time we meet her (TEH), this is the leadup:

Sherlock’s pulled John from the bonfire. Dirge-like violin(?) music carries over from the shot of John to the establishing shot outside 221B. The camera tilts down from the sky, where a helicopter is flying over, and we hear helicopter sounds over the last of the music. Then we hear Mummy’s chatter over the helicopter. The helicopter sounds end only when we cut to Sherlock in his chair listening to (enduring) his mother talk.

Understand that **the helicopter in the establishing shot is intentional**. Had it been an unwanted flyover in a pre-planned tilt-down shot of Baker Street, it would have been simple and cheap to refilm that shot. Barring that, our attention wouldn’t have been drawn to it (it’s _tiny_ in the frame!) with such a noticeable sound effect. The sound in this sequence is precisely mixed: music  > helicopter > Mummy’s voice. _The text is saying these things are related._

 **In _Sherlock_ , helicopters seem to symbolize power and privileged information.** In ASiB, Mycroft sends a helicopter to bring John to Buckingham Palace to introduce the Adler case, which Harry the equerry and “his employer” want handled out of the public eye. Magnussen brings Sherlock and John to Appledore in a helicopter, and Mycroft joins the Appledore fray in another.

By connecting Mummy’s voice to a helicopter sound, and the helicopter sound to the music over John’s rescue, this sequence introduces the idea that **Mummy has access to power and privileged information** , and may have a connection to John’s abduction.

 **And isn’t that a kind of relief** , that Mummy is more than she first appears? I reacted like John when I learned who these people on Sherlock’s couch were meant to be: “… they’re just… so… ordinary.” It was shocking that the Holmes parents could be so unexceptional, even vacuous, and it seemed initially like a questionable casting decision (Cumberbatch’s parents as Sherlock’s parents) and a cheap laugh at the goldfishes’ expense, but totally out of character for the upbringing we’d imagined for Sherlock and Mycroft.

Next, **consider Mummy’s outfit**. A popular [interpretation](http://finalproblem.tumblr.com/post/71989797366/mazarin221b-corpsereviver2-nonymoose-okay) is that the Holmes parents mirror Sherlock and John here:

(image source: [nonymoose](http://tmblr.co/mvi9BN91UIcaCJp53As4FRg))

But is that really, or only, what Mummy is doing? No signature blue scarf. And it’s hard to be certain, but I think her coat has a high collar rather than a popped one (note the button on the corner for fastening the collar in an upright position), and is thigh-length rather than calf-length like Sherlock’s Belstaff.

Another [dark medium-length coat with a high collar](http://www.sherlockology.com/wardrobe/coat-jim-moriarty) belongs to Jim (Jim, who has much in common with Sherlock - “You are me”):

I wondered if Mummy’s coat might also be The Kooples; no luck. But look:

Maybe [this](http://www.lyst.com/clothing/vivienne-westwood-red-label-black-melton-single-breasted-woolblend-coat/) isn’t actually Mummy’s coat; it’s hard to tell, and the buttons may be different. But the collar does look just the same to me.

In TEH, we get a first inkling that **Mummy’s got spine** when she shoves her foot in the door as Sherlock expels her:

We next see her at home at Christmas. She’s arranging [Christmas crackers](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_cracker) \- small holiday explosives - in a basket.

(It’s worth noting that in both episodes, we get a hint of her - her voice, her hands - before we see her. Remember that **Moriarty works in the shadows**.)

She threatens to turn “ **absolutely monstrous** ” if she ever finds out who put a bullet in her boy. In “The Final Problem” (FINA), ACD’s Moriarty is described as “diabolical” and “terrible.”

We next learn that Mummy is a **genius in mathematics** (in FINA, Moriarty is a professor of mathematics) who “gave it all up for children.” There’s a whole world of difficulty here (academia, motherhood, personal fulfillment, gender roles) explored by people lots smarter than me, but the language Mr Holmes uses is “gave it all up” - for Mummy it was a sacrifice, and she now calls mathematics “terribly fatuous.” She could _mean_ that, or it could be a _cover_ for her boredom-busting alternate identity as a consulting criminal.

Her book, “The Dynamics of Combustion,” isn’t the top-of-mind title for a book by a mathematician, but it does seem a likely title for someone with **knowledge of explosives**.

Let’s turn now to Moriarty.

**Moriarty’s Identity Is Initially Hidden**

We first learn of Moriarty from murderous cabbie Jefferson Hope in ASiP, who  **never uses a gendered pronoun** **for Moriarty**. Hope uses passive voice (“I was warned about [Sherlock]”) and non-gendered references (“somone out there who’s noticed you,” “a sponsor,” “a fan”).

At the end of TBB, General Shan “videochats” with a faceless, voiceless “M”:

who has Shan assassinated rather than risk Sherlock tracing the smuggling case back to “M.”  **If Moriarty is Jim, why is it so important that Sherlock not know his identity, since he reveals it himself at the end of the next episode?**

In TGG, Sherlock receives his first puzzle from (as we learn later) Moriarty:

It’s a packet found in an exploded building addressed to Sherlock and containing the phone on which Moriarty contacts Sherlock throughout the episode. This part zips right on by:

> SHERLOCK: Nice stationery. Bohemian.
> 
> LESTRADE: What?
> 
> SHERLOCK: From the Czech Republic. No fingerprints?
> 
> LESTRADE: No.
> 
> SHERLOCK  _(looking closely at the writing)_ : She used a fountain pen. A Parker Duofold – iridium nib.
> 
> JOHN: “She”?
> 
> SHERLOCK: Obviously.
> 
> JOHN  _(struggling not to sigh)_ : Obviously(!)

Here Sherlock thinks the  **package is from a woman**. He switches to the gender-neutral “they” for the rest of this scene, and John uses the masculine “he’s a bomber, remember” when they find Carl Powers’ shoes in 221C. When Sherlock solves the case, he proposes they “get his [the bomber’s] attention” via John’s blog.

After this, Moriarty “borrows” the voices of victims, making them read from pagers. The only victim who dies is the blind woman who heard Moriarty’s voice and said he sounded so _soft_ for a man.

> SHERLOCK: He killed the old lady because she started to describe him.
> 
> _(He raises a finger on his other hand.)_
> 
> SHERLOCK: Just once, he put himself in the firing line.
> 
> JOHN: What d’you mean?
> 
> SHERLOCK: Well, usually, he must stay above it all. He organises these things but no-one ever has direct contact.

Even Miss Wenceslas, who worked through Moriarty to get the fake Vermeer painting, never saw or heard Moriarty. (“Well, there was never any real contact; just messages … whispers.”)

This secrecy creates an exciting poolside reveal (Moriarty is Jim from I.T.!) at the end of S1, so maybe Jim was only jealously guarding his Moriarty identity until the right moment. But  **it also allows the possibility that any of the things Moriarty did weren’t done by Jim but by someone else, possibly a woman.**

Moriarty tells Sherlock (through a borrowed voice) that Carl Powers was killed for laughing at Moriarty, but we find out later that none of Carl’s classmates can be Moriarty:

> JOHN: Anything on the Carl Powers case?
> 
> SHERLOCK: Nothing. All the living classmates check out spotless. No connection.
> 
> JOHN: Maybe the killer was older than Carl?
> 
> SHERLOCK: The thought had occurred.

**Maybe Carl’s killer was much older - old enough to be his mother.**

In TRF, Jim’s brazen crimes and quick acquittal in the Trial of the Century are characteristic of ACD-Moriarty’s  _accomplices_ rather than Moriarty himself:

> Is there a crime to be done, a paper to be abstracted, we will say, a house to be rifled, a man to be removed—the word is passed to the Professor, the matter is organized and carried out. The agent may be caught. In that case money is found for his bail or his defence. But the central power which uses the agent is never caught—never so much as suspected.

(from FINA)

Each of these things suggest that Jim might not be Moriarty.

So who’s that at the end of HLV? Maybe it’s Jim, in a video produced and distributed by Moriarty: Mummy Holmes.

**Jim’s Back. Did You Miss Him?**

I argued [before](http://sweetlatejuliet.tumblr.com/post/73414426980/the-cam-eras-not-finished-with-his-last-vow) that it’d be ridiculous to have Moriarty actually be alive - to have Sherlock and Moriarty have faked their suicides at each other. John Watson, Steven Moffat (charming liar that he is) and I think that he actually blew his brains out on the roof of Bart’s.

I think  **_Sherlock_ combines ACD characters and deliberately obscures the combination** with a single name (more to say on that in the future), so what I really believe is that  _Jim_ is dead. If we separate “Jim” from “Moriarty,” it could really be the case that Moriarty’s back.

At just the right time for Sherlock, Moriarty appears on every TV in the country. Others theorize that Mycroft was behind this; he has the power and access to make it happen. But it’s not intrinsically  _Mycroft_ who has that power; it’s his combination of identity (roles in government) and technology that give him that access.

We’ve seen this unity of person and security/access break down for him before in this face of his family’s genius; Sherlock stole Mycroft’s ID card and got into restricted areas at Baskerville. And in HLV we have further confirmation that Mycroft lets his guard down around his family:

He’s left his laptop “on which depends the security of the free world” on the kitchen table where Mummy’s peeling potatoes.

Perhaps Mycroft spent more time with his parents after Sherlock murdered Magnussen, and Mummy took advantage of Mycroft’s blind spot for family to secretly “borrow” his laptop, enabling her Moriarty broadcast later.

It’s not a bullet-proof theory, though.

**Weaknesses in the Mummy-Is-Moriarty Idea**

Well, first,  **she’s Sherlock’s mum**. Is her goal actually to defame and _kill_ her son? (If so, why hasn’t she done it yet?) If that’s the case, she’ll lose all our sympathy and become a caricature, uninteresting as a character - unimaginably _evil_ , in the same way that she originally seemed unbelievably _ordinary_.

No, I can see her secretly engaging Sherlock in a genius battle of wits with questionable morality, or thwarting Sherlock’s and Mycroft’s efforts for justice when they interfere with her hypothetical business as a consulting criminal, but actually wanting to kill her son? That’s weird and not-right.

Another issue with the idea that Mummy has been Moriarty all along is that  **Jim Moriarty also claims the identity** , and can’t neatly be reduced to a ventriloquist’s dummy for Mummy-as-Moriarty the way the people strapped to bombs and reading their lines could be.

The beginning of ASiB ostensibly shows Jim getting a call from Irene, and after Sherlock deduces the Bond Air / Coventry plan, Irene texts Jim and Jim texts Mycroft to let him know they’ve figured it out. We could imagine that the show secretly elides Mummy’s participation in these conversations (Irene calls Mummy, Mummy calls Jim; Irene texts Mummy, Mummy texts Jim, Jim texts Mycroft) but this feels like a major stretch without any textual basis.

**Jim also “plays Moriarty” convincingly and whole-heartedly** in person to Sherlock, as when they talk at Baker Street after Jim is exonerated in the Trial of the Century, when “Richard Brook” gives Sherlock a knowing look at Kitty Riley’s flat, and especially when they talk on the rooftop at Bart’s.

Same thing with Mycroft; it’s implied that Jim was tortured while Mycroft’s people had him, and it’s hard to believe he’d have been able to hide his true identity and his involvement with Mummy if she was Moriarty and he was an actor she’d hired and coached.

And, you know, he kills himself. That’s pretty extreme if he’s just playing a role.

**Terrorism and the Networked Enemy**

Something that struck me in my re-reading and -viewing for this meta is the continuing and  **increasing presence of terrorism** throughout the show.

ASiP: Mycroft’s use of CCTV highlights societal surveillance.

TBB: Sherlock laments Shan’s escape by saying “ It must be a vast network, John; thousands of operatives. You and I, we barely scratched the surface.”

TGG: The “voices” Moriarty borrows are (potential, coerced) suicide bombers.

ASiB: Bond Air is Mycroft’s attempt to get ahead of “the terrorists.” Irene is kidnapped by a terrorist cell in Karachi.

THoB: Chemical weapons research. “Fear and stimulus.”

TRF: Jim Moriarty talks about his “big client list: rogue governments, intelligence communities … terrorist cells.”

TEH: Lord Moran plans a terrorist attack on Parliament.

TSoT: Major Sholto, John’s former commander (in Afghanistan, one assumes - part of the “war on terror”) and recipient of the Victoria Cross, is targeted because of the deadly incursion he led.

HLV: When Sherlock reads the paper in his parents’ kitchen, the front-page article is about Lord Smallwood’s suicide, while the below-the-fold article is  “Obama May Act Against Assad Without Backing.” Magnussen flicks John’s face and says he does that “to whole countries” as well as people.

At the end of ACD’s “His Last Bow,” there’s the “ **east wind** ” exchange:

> “There’s an east wind coming, Watson.”
> 
> “I think not, Holmes. It is very warm.”
> 
> “Good old Watson! You are the one fixed point in a changing age. There’s an east wind coming all the same, such a wind as never blew on England yet. It will be cold and bitter, Watson, and a good many of us may wither before its blast. But it’s God’s own wind none the less, and a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared.”

There, it’s a reference to the impending Great War (World War I).

At the end of HLV, Sherlock also speaks of the east wind, but he characterizes it as a childhood threat from Mycroft, and John refers to Sherlock himself as the east wind (coming for Moriarty). However,  **I see the most straightforward modernization of ACD’s “east wind,” a looming international threat, as the threat of terrorism.**

In the essay “Terrorism, Nostalgia, and the Pursuit of Sherlock Holmes in _Sherlock_ ” (in [_Sherlock and Transmedia Fandom: Essays on the BBC Series_](http://www.amazon.com/Sherlock-Transmedia-Fandom-Essays-BBC-ebook/dp/B008BQF31G/), a book that was published before S2 aired), Ellen Burton Harrington writes:

> Further, Sherlock’s portrayal of terror as localized in Moriarty and often personal in its motivation can be turned back to illuminate Conan Doyle’s stories, which also tend to depoliticize crime, having Holmes discover personal rather than political motivations for crimes. Ultimately, _Sherlock_ ’s treatment of Holmes’ “arch-enemy” reminds us of the pleasures of using fiction to escape from the reality of crime and terror, thus nostalgically evoking the original stories’ escapist function.

and

> [Attributing a divergent series of crimes to a versatile Moriarty] implies that there is an underlying order to criminal enterprise that defies fears of anarchic, urban violence and global terrorism, and that Sherlock can duel Moriarty to stop it.

What if that personal, apolitical, single-nemesis crime is where  _Sherlock_ seems to have started but not where it’s going?

What if Moriarty  _is_ Jim,  _and_ Mummy,  _and_ Magnussen, and a whole loosely connected terror network of geniuses creating chaos for fun and profit?  


What if MORIARTY, like HOUND, is an acronym?

Back to ASiP:

> JEFF: You’re not the only one to enjoy a good murder. There’s others out there just like you, except you’re just a man … and they’re so much more than that.
> 
> _(The side of Sherlock’s nose twitches in distaste.)_
> 
> SHERLOCK: What d’you mean,  more than a man? An organisation? What?
> 
> JEFF: There’s a name no-one says, an’ I’m not gonna say it either.

“There’s others” (plural), “they’re so much more” (plural), “a name” (singular). Moriarty.

What if this modern Sherlock  _is_ Holmes,  _and_ James Bond (blunt instrument and sharp dagger),  _and_ Stephen Ezard ( _The Last Enemy_ ) or Julian Assange?

It’s not perhaps as simply satisfying as the astonishing revelation that Mummy Is Moriarty! would be, but it might be a more realistically modernized Sherlock and world.

**And oh kids, if you believe this, just think what it says about TPTB and the long game.**


End file.
